Washngton DC: In a statement released today by the White House, President
Bush denied that Ronald Reagan had died. In a one page statement read
by Press Secretary David Martin the President said;

"The best
intelligence sources this government can muster has not been able to
prove the death of Ronald Reagan to any degree of certainty. That the
media insists otherwise is not cause for the American people to believe
that this great man has passed from us. While his time may come and
our nation will grieve, this is not yet the time."

"When all
the facts have been gathered I firmly believe the American people will
see this as a devious lie perpetrated by terrorist operatives working
within the newsrooms of the American media and I reaffirm my commitment
to routing out terrorism wherever the evildoers rear their ugly head."

During a brief
question and answer period following the statement, Newsweek reporter
Margaret Browne asked Secretary Martin wether he had seen the funeral
and ceremonies in Washington the previous week. Secretary Martin responded;
"There are certain disloyal elements in the entertainment industry
that have access to computerized special effects technology and money
enough to purchase air time on less scrupulous networks thus falsifying
an event that has never taken place. I reassert the President's position,
Ronald Reagan has not died."

Robert Manheim,
a reporter from the Washington Post asked if the President would make
available the information he based his findings on. Secretary Martin
said that the President would convene a Congressional Committee to study
this latest terrorist attack against the United States and that they
would release their findings 'in a few months' time.

A.J. Brown, a 19-year-old freshman at Durham Tech, was thanking
God it was Friday. It was 5 p.m., the school week was over, and in
an hour she'd be meeting her boyfriend to unwind.

Then: Knock, knock ... unexpected guests at
Brown's Duke

Manor apartment. Opening the
door, she found a casually dressed man, and a
man and woman in what appeared to be business attire. Her first
thought, she says, was, "Are these people going to sell me
something?"

But then the man in the suit introduced himself and the woman as
agents from the Raleigh office of the U.S. Secret Service. The other
man was an investigator from the Durham Police Department.

"Ma'am, we've gotten a report that you have anti-American material,"
the male agent said, according to Brown. Could they come in to have
a look around?

"Do you have a warrant?" Brown asked. They did not. "Then you're
not coming in my apartment," she said. And indeed, they stayed
outside her doorway. But they stayed a while--40 minutes, Brown
estimates--and gave her a taste of how dissenters can come under
scrutiny in wartime.

Photo By Alex Maness

Threat or dissent? A.J. Brown
and
her
anti-Bush poster

And all because of a poster on her wall.

Though she's still a teenager, Brown is already more informed about
political repression than most Americans. She's been politically aware
and involved since grade school. "In second grade, I saw the Gulf
War on television, and seeing those bombs drop, it did something to
me," she says. "I knew from some news reports that there were
innocent people dying."

In middle school, Brown became interested in environmentalism and
civil liberties. She made the shift to full-fledged activist at Jordan High
School when she became involved with Youth Voice Radio, a media
collective with a leftist bent. Most recently, she's been involved with
the movement against the war in Afghanistan.

Brown and fellow activists often discuss government encroachments
on free speech and political organizing, she says, as do some of her
favorite hip-hop artists. She loves her music--and that may have been
what sparked the turn of events that brought the Secret Service to her
door.

Brown suspects it began with the noise complaints. On Oct. 22, a
Monday evening, she stayed up late playing some new CDs for her
boyfriend. By her own admission, she was playing them too loud.
Around midnight, a Durham police officer came by to tell her to turn it
down, and she obliged.

Two nights later, someone from Duke Manor called in another noise
complaint, and again a police officer came to Brown's door. This
time, she says, her music wasn't playing at an offensive volume. The
police officer speculated that the call may have been about someone
else's stereo. During this visit, and unlike the first, the officer had a full
view of the wall that faces Brown's front doorway, a detail that would
become relevant two days later: On that wall hung The Poster.

Brown got it at an "anti-inauguration" protest in Washington, D.C.
Distributed to hundreds of activists, it depicts George W. Bush
holding a length of rope against a backdrop of lynching victims, and
reads: "We hang on your every word. George Bush: Wanted, 152
Dead"--a reference to the number of people executed by the state of
Texas while Bush was governor. Brown believes that the message
caused the Durham policeman who paid the second visit to her
apartment to recommend a third.

On Friday, Oct. 26, two Secret Service agents, along with Durham
police investigator Rex Godley, came to Brown's apartment. Special
Agent Paul Lalley, who did most of the talking, spoke first. "Ma'am,
we've gotten a report that you have anti-American material, or
something like that, in your apartment," he said, according to Brown.
Then the female agent asked if they could come inside.

When Brown pressed them for a warrant and refused to allow them
in, she says, "They started to talk to me about how, 'We're not here
to take you away or put you in jail.' They were like, 'We need to
follow up on every report we get.' I said, 'That's understandable, but
how would you even know what's in my apartment?'

"They just said they had gotten information from some place," she
says. She speculates that it was from the police officer who visited for
the second noise complaint.

Godley, the Durham police investigator, won't say where the
authorities got their tip about Brown's poster. "The only thing I can tell
you is that we were assisting the Secret Service on one of their
cases," he says.

Lalley referred questions about the visit to Special Agent Craig
Ulmer, who heads the Secret Service office in Raleigh.

"We went in the first place because we received a tip about a threat
against the president," Ulmer says. He refuses to identify the source of
the tip, except to say that it was a "concerned citizen" and not a law
enforcement officer. It's Secret Service policy to keep such sources
confidential.

"We can't discuss who gives us information like that, because we
want people to bring us information," Ulmer says. "If we burn our
bridges, so to speak, we're not going to get help from the public."

Ulmer added that the poster "was in plain view, even from the
window, so anyone could have tipped us off."

The agents persisted in their effort to get a peek inside the apartment.
"They were being friendly, trying to get me to let them in," Brown
says. After a while, Brown called her mother, an IBM employee who
is in the Army Reserve. "She said to absolutely not let them in,"
Brown says. Not sure what else to do, Brown passed the
phone--with her mother still on the line--to one of the agents.

The standoff continued, and eventually the agents explained why they
had come by: "We already know what it is; it's a target of Bush," one
of them said, according to Brown--apparently a reference to the
poster. She informed them it was no such thing. They then said, "Well,
it's Bush hanging himself." Nope, she told them.

Finally, Brown relented a bit, agreeing to open the door and show
them her poster wall. "They looked in, and the lady was like, 'Ohhhh,
that's not that bad.'" The male agent added, "We've seen worse."

Still, Brown's brush with the authorities wasn't over. "Since they were
just gawking at my wall, I decided to explain it."

The wall features Brown's favorite art and mementos: a high-school
photo project showing the perils of smoking cigarettes; a Pink Floyd
poster ("It has that phrase, 'Mother should I trust the government,' so
I had to get it"); posters for two Japanese cartoon shows; several
pictures she took at protests and rallies; and a headband with
"Democracy" on it. And, of course, the Bush-as-hangman poster.

Having seen the poster, Brown says, the agents questioned her
further, asking: "Do you have any Afghanistan stuff in your apartment,
or anything pertaining to that? Any pro-Taliban stuff?"

"I kept saying no," Brown says, "and I was like, personally, I think the
Taliban are a bunch of assholes." With that, the investigator and the
agents bid her adieu.

Brown was temporarily rattled by the visit from the Secret Service,
she says, but the poster's still up, and she's still committed to her
activism. "I'm definitely going to be vocal," she says. "If things get
really hairy and they decide to come after activists, then I'd have to
just grit my teeth and go through it."

Ulmer rejects the notion that Brown was targeted because of her
politics, and he insists that the Secret Service would have checked
this tip out even if it had come in before the events of Sept. 11. "We
were doing our job in this particular case," he says, "and I don't think
we could have done it any better."

"The Secret Service takes all threats against the president seriously,
and we go out to check on every one. A citizen thought that there was
a threat, and we went and talked to Ms. Brown and we found that
there was not a threat." The poster, he says, was "misconstrued" by
the tipster. "So it's not a big issue. The issue is that someone
misinterpreted some writing."

But when "some writing" on a poster is investigated by federal
authorities, constitutional issues come into play. Some legal analysts
are warning that the new national security vigilance, and new laws
passed to counter terrorism, might impinge on free speech in big and
small ways.

"A poster of Bush, even if he's in a noose, is protected speech during
wartime or peacetime," notes Alex Charns, a Durham attorney who
specializes in civil rights. Such speech is all the more protected, he
points out, when it's displayed within a person's home.

"If a trained police officer doesn't know the difference between
political speech and a threat to the president, then we're all in trouble,"
Charns says. "If the Secret Service has nothing better to do than
check on political posters, that's a bad sign."

The Web sites of the American Civil Liberties Union
(www.aclu.org) and the National Lawyers Guild (www.nlg.org)
offer analysis of the changing legal climate and advice for what
to do if local or federal authorities come knocking.